BEST FEATURE FILM

Tempestad by Tatiana Huezo | 2016 | Mexico | 105'

The director who takes the audience on a contemplative and cinematically superb, poetic journey of exploring fear, corruption, social injustice and above all - the human strength to deal with and overcome misfortune of someone's destiny.

Best European Feature

Radio Kobani by Reber Dosky | 2016 | Netherlands | 72'

Jury awards the film that through powerful, very articulated emotions opens up many important questions, given within very precise and personal directors’ approach through which he made a movie both dramatic and poetic at the same time, telling the drama of the Kurds and the sense of “resilience”.

BEST SHORT FILM

Condrong by Goncalo Almeida | 2016 | Portugal | 10'

This film has attracted our attention with its remarkable story and breathtaking image. It was a pleasure to watch this film and to fill the emotion in it, despite the black and white tones in which it is solved.

STUDENT JURY

Best STUDENT Film

The engagment of the crew who created this documentary, focuses on the refugees who have escaped from the crisis of the Democratic Republic of Congo by finding shelters in the neighbouring country of Uganda. The physical and emotional abuse was brutally inflicted to the victims, confessions of whose would still carry pain and indescribable trauma. We would listen to their experiences, thoughts and reflections, which were narrated by different age groups – teenagers, adults and middle-aged adults – and expading our point of view. Despite being away from torture but not being able to excape from poverty, you could notice from their eyes a yerning desire to come to Europe.

This frame, echoing the commercial photography schools of the Eighties, creates an immediate ambiguity in the eyes of the observers. Photography, as we know, does not have a duty to show, but to suggest. By using sometimes the real life multiformat with its indecipherable forms of chaos. If we sharp the look, the term that may be related to some perception of this image is what the British call “Black and white thinking”. The philosophical term is "dichotomous thought". The dichotomous thought is cold, dry, as the negative shets in photography: it divides the reality into light and shadow with a net cut, removing its complexity, ambiguity, muteness, and every nuance. It reasons in terms of "anything or nothing". Thus the frame enucleates a dichotomous exemplification that breaks the image and ironically opens up with dichotomous thinking, the exemplary thought of those who think that things can be just right or wrong, only wholly white or completely black. Because in this complex world where the chromatic, cultural, geographical, emotional and economic diversity is an integral part of the cosmopolitan universe, this image follows with its communicative violence, precisely those who refrain from complexity for its convenience: by exemplifying, cutting, moving, dividing .

To break the fusion sometimes serves a table, a wall, a law.

And this frame tells the drama of the scheme, the division of the world into two, rigid and permanent distinctions. Who's up, who's down, who runs and who's under. By right of birth, for unworthy advantage declared.

So far, no one has been able to challenge the new modern totalitarianism, just as he did by himself. The marvelous camera and real story of this man, nowadays symbol in Russia and beyond, serves as true inspiration for engaged artists all over the world. Director, Irene Langerman, understood the spirit of artist himself by following Pavlensky over a long period of time and she was able to mix professionally archive material, also documentaries and various scenes to give the full stature of this character now immortal by her documentary.

The film which depicts the reality of the Balkan students who are facing challenges which not only mold their lives but the future of our countries - narrowing down all options to - staying or leaving. To a promising film maker, an unconventional girl film maker and her debute.